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Cream of Artichoke Soup
6 artichokes Few grains cayenne 4 cups boiling water Few gratings nutmeg 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons Sauterne wine 2 tablespoons flour 1 cup scalded cream 1 1/2 teaspoons salt 1 egg 2 cucumbers Cook artichokes in boiling water until soft, and rub through a sieve. Melt butter, add flour and seasonings, pour on hot liquor, and cook one minute. Add cream, wine, and egg slightly beaten. Pare cucumbers, cut in one-third inch cubes, saute in butter, and add to soup. Jerusalem artichokes are used for the making of this soup.
Celery Soup I 3 cups celery (cut in one-half inch pieces) 1 slice onion 3 tablespoons butter 1 pint boiling water 1/4 cup flour 2 1/2 cups milk Salt and pepper Wash and scrape celery before cutting in pieces, cook in boiling water until soft, and rub through a sieve. Scald milk with the onion, remove onion, and add milk to celery. Bind with butter and flour cooked together. Season with salt and pepper. Outer and old stalks of celery may be utilized for soups. Serve with croutons, crisp crackers, or pulled bread.
A smooth sunchoke soup finished with cream, wine and egg, with sauteed cucumber cubes for texture. Nearly all the risk is in the last minute.
- The hinge: the eggBeat the egg with a ladleful of the hot soup first, then stir that back into the pot off the heat. Added straight to a simmering soup it curdles into threads, and the soup must not boil again once it is in.
- "6 artichokes" means Jerusalem artichokesThe note at the end is easy to miss. These are sunchokes, not globe artichokes, and six tubers is a vague measure since they vary widely; the recipe gives no weight, so any modern equivalent is a guess -- scrub and roughly chop enough to cook down in the 4 cups of water.
- SievingRubbing cooked sunchokes through a sieve is what gives the velvety body. A food mill or a blender followed by a sieve does the same work; skins should not go into the finished soup.
- SauterneSpelled without the final s, as American books of the period often did; it may mean a French Sauternes or, as commonly then, a generic domestic white, and the recipe does not say which. Two tablespoons is a seasoning, not a base, and any white wine will read much the same at that quantity.
- Scalded creamHeated to just below a simmer, when a rim of bubbles forms at the edge. Scalding was routine with untreated dairy; with pasteurised cream you are only warming it so it does not chill the soup.
- CucumbersPeel, seed if the seeds are large, cut in 1/3-inch dice and saute in butter until barely translucent. They are meant to stay firm, so add them at the table or in the last moment, not before the egg goes in.
- Seasoning by eye"Few grains cayenne" and "few gratings nutmeg" mean roughly a pinch each. Both are easy to overshoot in a pale, mild soup.
- YieldAbout 6 cups, serving four as a first course.